Tag: criticism

Talkin’ ’bout Pop Music

It ain’t “Lies” but it’s The Knickerbockers.

I’ve been thinking about Pop Music a bit the past week or two, prompted by being forced to listen to my wife’s choice of music in our car one day. It’s some “hits of the 70’s, 80’s, and 90’s” piece of something-or-other…unless you like that sort of thing, then it’s a wonderful FM station which plays all the greatest songs you know and love. I’ve assiduously avoided listening to radio from the first opportunity I had to not listen to it, sometime in my late teens or early 20’s. I suppose some readers don’t understand what I’m talking about. Through high school we listened to music in two places, basically: cars and our bedrooms. We had AM radio in the cars and vinyl records in our bedrooms. If you really got into it and had deep pockets, you bought a big Wollensak reel-to-reel tape machine, but if you were a wannabe like my brother and me, you bought a cheap little portable recorder and stuck the painfully crappy microphone in front of a tiny transistor radio speaker to record “off the air”.

In small-market Spokane only two radio stations catered to young people and their shocking tastes in music: KNEW (neé KJRB by the time I left high school), and KXLY. All popular music of whatever genre mixed freely on these stations. No FM station played popular music until around the time I entered college when KREM-FM suddenly started an “underground” playlist. Underground radio featured stoned out DJ’s: “Hi, I’m John. Yeah. We’ll be playing some heavy tunes for a while. I hope you like them.” We programmed the buttons on the radio–oh Lord, do I have to explain how car radios worked back then? Those too?–to the two AM stations and became adept at punching the button for whichever one wasn’t playing a song we loathed, which happened frequently. You’ll understand in another paragraph.

But back to that moment a week ago when I listened to many songs I hadn’t heard in years. The one which sticks in my head is “If This Is It” by Huey Lewis and the News. I’m going to hate myself for looking that up and reminding my brain about it: I had a viral ear-worm for days after hearing that song. It’s not that I don’t appreciate Mr Lewis, it’s that I don’t particularly like that specific song. “I Wanna New Drug” has sentiment I can get behind. “The Heart of Rock & Roll” zips along quite nicely. But a slow near-ballad which basically says, “do you see this going where I think it’s going” struck me then and continues to as ridiculously mundane. Maybe you like it. Fine, you’re entitled because we all ask music to deliver different things and if the song delivers, great…for you. I like absolutely stupid songs because of a bass line or because the singer’s voice seems to mock the very words being sung, or because it has a frenetic beat, or a multitude of other reasons. I’m not going to mention two extremely popular groups which demographics say I should love, and I can’t stand them. I lost a friend over that once.

Listening to my wife’s radio station, I had a startling realization. I had been getting pretty egotistic about how broad my musical horizons are. I like country, blues, rock, blues-rock, folk, world/ethnic, jazz of various ilks, classical, a little bit of hip-hop and…pop. My enforced listening session in the car showed me I don’t really like pop per se, I like it very selectively. I protested to myself about all that pop music I liked from my youth. That’s when it hit me: we like all those songs which formed us as we left childhood, negotiated adolescence, and became adults. After that? Not so much. We went in different directions. Some folks I’ve met never went anywhere. They only listen to songs from the oeuvre when they were 10-25.

Today proves my point. Yesterday I finished chores and declared it to be Birthday Week. I’ve decided one day isn’t big enough to handle 70 years. Until Tuesday June 11th, I’m celebrating. Today unfolded at a leisurely pace, pointed toward some music listening, writing, and a Phillies game. I decided to listen to music from the beginning of my listening life, and then realized “the beginning” eludes definition. I settled for the year my pre-teen fan-tasy grew into musical appreciation: 1966. Until then I’d focused on whatever TV and radio served up: The Beatles, early The Rolling Stones, The Monkees. In 1965 my brother and I began buying a few different bands on 45rpm records, and in 1966 I got my first 33rpm LP, The Young Rascals. It coincided with my birthday and the end of the school year. I ran out of the schoolroom never to return to elementary school, and I ran into adolescence with a newfound appreciation for the melding of pop, soul, and rock which had started to occur.

I decided to re-introduce myself to 1966 by looking at the Top 40 lists for the year and selecting songs to listen to from it. Locating a wonderful site called Top 40 Weekly, I selected 1966 to be presented with the Top 40 chart for every single week in 1966! Wow. Here’s the beginning of the first one from January of that year:

Top 40 Weekly’s chart for the beginning of 1966.

This proves my point. (Of course, it’s self-referential, but nevermind.) I look at the first song and start singing the lyrics. I look at the second one and smile and hear Paul singing the title words. Likewise with #3 and #4. I’ll admit #5 threw me for a minute–I’m more familiar with “Catch Us If You Can” by that group, as heard on the Lloyd Thaxton show. Giving it a play, though, it came back to mind. How about #6? Check. And #7? Check. Not until #8 did I say to myself, “punch the button.” I like a few Righteous Brothers songs, but they carried a crooning 50’s style of music into the 60’s, and it didn’t play well. But who can’t smile listening to #9?

Then we hit #10. Lord knows how Eddy Arnold managed to get a charting song out of that number. I felt the revulsion rise up. Today’s form of button-pushing, the skip-track button on the streaming service came into play quickly. The remaining songs? I smiled again at #11; sang the lyrics to #12 with my wife; and wondered how #’s 13 and 14 got on the list. I don’t recall ever hearing them. The Shangri-Las managed to push out a charting song in 1966? You gotta admire that, even if the song was horrible. (I never heard that one either.) Gary Lewis’s song typified his talentless group, but made me remember “This Diamond Ring” so it wasn’t worthless. I couldn’t find #17 on Tidal, and then a relaxed wide smile–the Beatles again. Before there were LP’s in my life, there were 45’s:

Both songs in the top 20 starting January 1966.

I couldn’t find Ramsey Lewis Trio’s version of “Hang On Sloopy” and wonder what the heck a jazz trio could’ve done with The McCoys’ big hit. The Beach Boys were a selective thing for me, and #20 didn’t hit the spot. I continued through the list until I hit #40. It kinda made the whole journey worthwhile: “Lies” by The Knickerbockers. I loved that song; still do. They had another great one as shown at the top of this post.

The final 45 I bought occurred in 1976. I bought it only because I knew I would never like the album, but I wanted the song for posterity’s sake:

“The king is dead but not forgotten…this is a song about Johnny Rotten” –from “My My, Hey Hey” by Neil Young.

Our musical likes have more to do with where we grew up and what we listened to at the time, than anything objectively wonderful about the music. We like what we like, and we don’t what we don’t. Objective criticism fails precisely because it rejects subjectivity. Do I like “bad” songs? You bet. Do I dislike “good” ones? True. Are you totally inexplicable to me because you like “A White Shade Of Pale”? Abso-effing-lutely.

Rhyme time

St. Lawrence Seaway, NY. September 2005.

I took my tumble into poetry when I returned to college in 1981 for an English Education degree after four years spent writing and editing weekly newspapers. We were required to pick one of three concentrations: Literature, Composition, or Linguistics. While we were expected to take classes in all three areas, the majority of our coursework would occur in the concentration we chose for our major. I already possessed a degree in Communications (with a concentration in Journalism), so I chose Literature. It seemed to be the most useful choice between that and Linguistics. I don’t recall how many courses in poetry I took; I presume it was two plus I had a class in Shakespeare. (As part of my Communications degree I also had taken a course in Medieval Literature which is as much poem as prose, in my opinion.)

I remember my poetry professor as a grandfatherly figure: white hair, thick glasses, dressed always in a button-down shirt and a thin cardigan sweater. He wasn’t pedantic; rather he sought to lure us in to the beauty of poetry, slowly instilling an appreciation for the nuances which one poem achieves perhaps a bit better than another. He taught the meaning of the word “scansion” and how to do it. He taught us the formal structures of historic poetic forms, such as the various forms of sonnets. I distinctly remember he appreciated but ultimately relegated to B-status the poems of Henry Reed (“Lessons of the War: I: Naming of Parts“) and A. E. Housman (“Terence, This is Stupid Stuff“). He attempted to relate a continuum where doggerel existed on one end and truly sublime, great poetry existed on the other. “There is a difference between verse and poetry,” he insisted.

A while back I wrote a poem about why I don’t often write rhymed poems. Too many of the poems I read online from those who fancy themselves poets barely nudge the needle from where it pegs at “doggerel”. It’s down here at this end of the spectrum where we read “cowboy poems” and such. Rhymed poetry doesn’t have to be doggerel or its cousin, trite whimsy. I hope my poem might exist in the middle ground, somewhere between a clerihew and Housman’s “Terence”. Here’s the beginning of the latter:

"Terence, this is stupid stuff:
You eat your victuals fast enough;
There can't be much amiss, 'tis clear,
To see the rate you drink your beer.

My barely informed opinion about rhymed poetry? Look to Shakespeare who crafted his poems to specific rhyme schemes, with specific metric schemes which must scan appropriately. Another, more modern poet who understood how to write a poem which rhymed is Robert Frost. Here’s an example, to be discussed below:

Locked Out
(As Told to a Child)

When we locked up the house at night,
We always locked the flowers outside
And cut them off from window light.
The time I dreamed the door was tried
and brushed with buttons upon sleeves,
The flowers were out there with the thieves.
Yet nobody molested them!
We did find one nasturtium
Upon the steps with bitten stem.
I may have been to blame for that:
I always thought it must have been
Some flower I played with as I sat
At dusk to watch the moon down early.

(as transcribed from Robert Frost: Collected Poems, Prose, & Plays [The Library of America])

Is this a great poem? No, but Frost tells a small tale easily, conversationally, with rhymed words. He warns us in a sense by titling it “as told to a child” and keeps the central thoughts of the poem simple. And what’s this? He chooses not to rhyme the very last line? Doesn’t that just punch it up all the more? Great poets reveal their hand even when the poem isn’t truly great. Looking deeper, I’m reminded how just as adults get nuances out of ‘children’s cartoons’, we gather meaning in passing from lines like the first three lines. A child would take it simplistically, but we consider the symbolism of locking up all that is natural outside of ourselves, of shutting ourselves off from beauty, of starving the fair flowers of our existence from the light of our presence. Frost uses the tenth line (“I may have been to blame for that”) to zing us with a perfect iambic (dah-DAH) tetrameter (four of ’em). To my mind, it hurries us through the line as if the narrator feels a bit guilty that his inadvertent playing with a flower has been used to invoke a threat of thieves to a small child.

Those are just a few thoughts which occur to me in looking at this poem again after first reading it about a week ago. Look, I understand we’re not all four-time Pulitzer Prize winners. But can’t we at least try? Must we succumb to “My boyfriend left me/I’m feeling blue/I’ll leave the country/Now that we’re through”? Just as a prose thought can be made meaningful by converting it to poetry, consider if your poem isn’t so mundane it ought to be simply stated as prose. Making four lines rhyme A/B/A/B shows about as much skill as photographing a sunset and thinking you’re a great photographer just because you captured a glorious sight made-to-order.

I applaud the poets I read online who use blank, free-form verse yet hew to ideas of tune, rhythm, compression, precise word choice, and who frankly have something worthy to say. We can’t realistically dream we’re rhymers like Frost, or poets laureate like Stanley Kunitz, or poets-for-the-ages like Dante Alighieri. But…we can try.

one of my many pet peeves

if you’re going to post poetry as if you’re a poet, for God’s sake, learn the damn language! It’s pretty easy to do that and still write bad poetry, but it’s impossible for you to write good poetry without a basic understanding of grammar, usage, and mechanics.

When I listen to you

gossip-monger, September 2008, Orlando, FL
When I listen to You
I don't hear Her...
Them?
Voices telling me
(in words I've never heard before):
Things I've suspected,
Never knew,
Don't want to believe...
Never believed.
Your words resonate,
Sound those harmonies,
Those sympathetic vibrations
Deep within me.
Her disparaging judgment of me
Sits numbly in my soul--
This benign tumor neither
Growing, shrinking, or leaving.
Her close (convenient) friend
Blocking refuge's door:
"She doesn't want to talk
To you." But--
"I'll talk to him," She said;
A limited engagement.
What did She say?
To Her friends?
To too many?
How could this man,
So wanting conversation,
Communication, some
Shred of mutual effort 
To maintain a marriage,
Find himself wedded to 
Her non-talking cold
Judgment, spitting out
Her assessment:
Verbal Abuser?
When I listen to You
I can't see Verbal Abuser.
You paint me differently:
Partner. Spouse.
I see this. I think,
Maybe,
Maybe, this Her,
Might have erred.